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All Characters are 18 years or older.
This story is a bit of a slow burn dual-story that very much requires the reader to start from the beginning. It does not require intimate knowledge of D&D or other TTRPGs, but is very much about playing those sorts of games and the fantasy of roleplaying. The two stories are those of the Players, and their Characters. As such this story comes with a warning of having strange Point of View/Narrative hotswaps in the middle of chapters as the players around the table move in and out of character.
In this chapter you can expect MF, exhibitionism, voyeurism and oral.
The third session brings on dangerous intrigue and politics with the bandits, and some hot tubbing fun with the game group.
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Chapter 23
The armoured treads of the elf's sabatons were a steady, dull metallic crunch as she wound her way through the underground grotto. Meliana of the Autumn Veil, bounty hunter, monster killer and exiled bastard heir of Tel Minnor, was very well acquainted with the crowded, gloomy space - once a smuggler's hold, then a hidden tavern during the prohibition years, and now a meeting place for those looking to trade gold for skills better kept out of the merchant sun.
She took a right, avoiding the eastern caverns where Darjvok the Humourless ran his illicit spice den, and headed directly for the back caverns. One man ruled over the Grotto, and she wasn't one to try and rub elbows with other killers. One never knew when a grin was simply hiding a blade for when your back was turned in a place like this.
Meliana reached the iron-clad door and pounded on it with her fist until a small viewport slid aside.
"'Oos it then?" came the craggly voice of the watchkeeper.
"Open the door, Djerek," Meliana growled quietly. "Before I open it myself."
"Ah, yes, Mistress," Djerek grovelled from the other side of the door. "Right away, Mistress."
The viewport clanged shut, and several loud locks were turned with heavy
chunks
before the door opened. The elven beauty swept by the decrepit homunculus, its twisted form no longer even an odd curiosity to her. It was the same obsequious, snivelling thing every time.
She strode confidently down the single, dark corridor, unneeding of torchlight with her elven eyes illuminating the darkness. The walls were riddled with doors, some spaced out enough that an entire ballroom could be held behind them, others so close that they couldn't be more than the width of the doors themselves. She'd only ever seen behind a few of them and wasn't curious enough to stop and check if any were locked.
"Ah, Lady Meliana," Stellan Icepick said as she entered his audience chamber at the end of the corridor. "I assume this means that you've... completed the previously requested task?"
Stellan was a man feared by many, both for his appetites and the dangerous information that he gathered and sifted through like a successful prospector seeking gold in a muddy river. He was tall, and pale, his sharply aristocratic features almost elven in their unearthly beauty. His perfectly arranged black hair was long and hung down over his shoulders. He wore a ring on every finger, and his jacket was of red velvet accented with thread of gold while his boots and belt were made of basilisk skin.
The wine glass he held aloft, as usual, was half-filled with blood. Because Stellan was a Vampire.
"I finished the job as requested," Meliana said, removing the orange veil she wore over the lower half of her face when dealing with anyone she didn't trust. It had taken time for that trust to build between the killer and the information broker, but after decades of successful transactions, build it had. "The princeling is dead, and none suspect that it was anything other than a tragic accident."
"Ah, good," Stellan said, his smile growing wide. "The clients will be very pleased indeed. Payment handled as usual, I presume?"
"I need some of it in a diamond, at least 500 gold in value, but otherwise yes," Meliana said. Stellan would arrange for the transfer of the funds into a series of accounts she held in banks across the Eastwedge Coast, far out of reach of the royal family that had disposed of her years before. Accounts that would one day fund the downfall of an empire.
"It shouldn't take too much time to acquire the diamond," the vampire said with an easy smirk. "A day at most. Where are you staying? I'll have it delivered."
It was Meliana's turn to smirk - she trusted Stellan, but not that much. It was an old game he liked to play - if he found out where she was staying, he would charge an exorbitant fee for releasing the information to one of the upstart bounty hunters who had heard of the price on her head. He knew it would never come to anything, and helped clean out the lower echelons of the profession before the city got rife with unprofessional idiots forcing prices down.
"Have it delivered to the Temple of Confidence," Meliana said. "I can pick it up there."
"As you say," he replied with a dismissive wave, as if finding a gem like that was so easy anyone could do it. "Now, I do have another job in your price range if you're interested?"
Meliana hesitated but then shook her head. "I'm leaving the city on another matter," she said. "I'll be gone a month or more, most likely."
"Heading west?" Stellan asked. "I hear the summer heat isn't so bad out west this year."
"South," Meliana said.
Stellan frowned. "You can't mean to head to the front, Meliana. Not even
